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Breeding Ability isn't a percentage, it's just like Showing Aptitude, in that it's a fixed number that you can only generally get an idea of. (Yellow/C papers are given to one range of breeding ability scores, Red/B to the next step up, Blue/A to the next step above that, Gold/Star to the step above that.)

When you breed two horses together, their Breeding Ability scores are used to determine the quality of the resulting foal. There's a range of scores that could be produced based on their BA. If it's anything like Showing Aptitude, then it can be a pretty hefty chunk lower than the sire or dam's score. This is based on an experiment I ran a few RL years ago, where I bred a WHOLE BUNCH of foundation horses together, and decided that perfect foundation pairs will produce foals with PT scores of 8.9 and 10.4 reliably. Perfect foundations are 9.9 PT, so they probably have 9.9 BA, as well. (I think Ammit ran a similar one, based on several different combinations of horses in pastures.)

Breeding Advice compares a foal's breeding ability to both parents' scores, which is why if you have a regular foundation mare and you breed her to a star, you're pretty much guaranteed to have the foal altered automatically.

Technically, if you're doing everything you can to ensure the quality of the next generation, there shouldn't be much difficulty in getting better foals. But the chance of getting them doesn't increase, in theory it stays exactly the same. However, until very recently we didn't have Mare Comparison, so KNOWING your mares are superior breeders to their dams was really hard to verify. It got increasingly more difficult at higher generations because there was 'mare lag' - the overall ability of mare breeding ability lagged behind stallion ability because you could guarantee the colt was superior, whereas mares... well, it was a numbers game.

When Mare Comparison came out it decimated my higher generation project, but I'd pretty much expected that because my PT scores had plateaued, meaning the mares had not, overall, gotten better in relation to the stallions.

Clear as mud?

This is a post that a player made back in 2007...

Oh hey, I wrote that. XD The bottom part is still incorrect since it says the only way to tell how good a breeder is is to breed them; this was before comparison testing. But the basic principle otherwise remains the same. I guess if it hasn't been disproven in a decade...

.Peering closely at Stone Silo Farm. LookingGlass?

So the parents' breeding ability generates both numbers, the foal's breeding ability & its showing ability.

And a horse's PT is a description of its showing ability + consistency. Does that mean that a perfectly consistent horse's PT exactly corresponds to its showing ability?